I’d like my book discovery to be this whimsical (and slightly reminiscent of the TARDIS, too!). Failing that, I’ll take any suggestions!CC-licensed image “Book Exchange” by Flickr user oatsy40

Suggestions for 2013 books have been flowing in, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how we find books, and how we create the contender list that we post come the on-season in September.

(A brief housekeeping note: unlike our fellow award bloggers over at Heavy Medal and Calling Caldecott, we won’t go totally dark in the off-season, mostly because if we did, no one would ever be able to keep up with the reading when the on-season rolls around. So we’ll still be around, posting every week or two, from now until August, about what we’re reading and what we’re seeing and what we think may have Printz legs and, if we think there are any hard thorny questions about the Printz worth visiting or revisiting, possibly tackling those as well.)

(Edited to add: well, we kind of went dark because LIFE. But we’re not gone. We’re reading and thinking and we’ll post again one of these days soon and we love and miss you all a lot.)

So let’s talk about creating the contender list. And about crowdsourcing. And mostly about discovering the secret gems.

The results are in, and opening the honor vote to the larger list made for some interesting shifts in some of the votes — although not statistically significant shifts when it comes to the actual Pyrite* honor slate.

ALA definitely affected our voter pool (another note for next year, get all the voting done by the Thursday of ALA week), so we went down to only 35 voters (from nearly 70 for the Pyrite gold — can you have Pyrite gold? Hmmm), and it wasn’t exactly the same voter pool. However, the results show that this smaller and somewhat different pool was mostly in agreement with the original voter pool.

Which gives us hope that Seraphina, which we love a LOT, does indeed have a chance at the RealPrintz (although we left it off our prediction list, given the challenge real fantasy has historically faced), since it continues to be the second most loved title for the Pyrite, first giving CNV something that resembled a run for its money and now sweeping the honor vote. Read on for details and the rest of the lineup.

The Pyrite version of silver is nickel, right? Wait. What? Apparently we are just as bad at chemistry as we are at math. Used under CC license from flickr user yaybiscuits123.

Honor Vote Time!

Honor book voting policies are weirdly absent from the RealCommittee P&P, but we checked in with a number of friends and colleagues, including at least one former RealCommittee Chair and one former RealCommittee Admin Assistant to make sure we had it down. And so we are ready to put the honor book voting procedures into black and white for all to see.

Look! The results! Only… we stripped out the titles from this version. So now you HAVE to read on.

Before we say anything else, or share shiny data, and definitely before we name the book that gets the Pyrite* medal (which, really, would be more of a paperweight), we want to say thank you.

Thank you, of course, for reading the blog. But mostly, and most importantly, thank you for caring about YA literature. Thank you for sharing your passion, for having opinions, for thinking about books, and for making this all worthwhile. We have such a lovely little corner of the internet — our community is so thoughtful, passionate, and kind; it’s a joy to be a part of it.

Ok, enough sentimentality. We’ll save the rest of the emotions for Monday’s tears (for joy or sorrow, but Karyn at least almost always cries a little during the YMAs).

On Saturday, Someday joined forces with HVLA to host a proper Mock Printz.

(And speaking of mock awards, if you haven’t already, hop on over to Heavy Medal for the deets on their Mock Newbery. Riveting reading!)

Our first ever live Mock event was a little chaotic (we learn by doing) and completely fantastic. Joy is writing it up in detail (with voting breakdowns) for the HVLA blog, and I’ll link that as soon as it’s up, but we thought we’d share a quick snapshot immediately.

You might, perhaps, have noticed the blog has been slow. You might have found yourself, say, spending scads of money on Thinkgeek or Onlineshoes or Etsy while waiting for a blog post to load. Oh, was that just me? Well, I’ll have some happy relatives come Christmas.

But you know what I am talking about, and we’ve all been frustrated. Well, we have some good news and some not so good news.

The good news: the blogs are migrating! Soon, Someday will be shiny and new and we’ll have a new logo and it will all be clean design and fast loading awesomesauce.

The bad news: Instead of some lead time, and waiting until the optimal time in terms of the blog (which would be after the YMA announcements, of course), the server situation is dictating immediate action.

As in, midnight tonight.

Sadly, this means five super exciting posts that are in the works but not ready to go live are now on hold until the migration is over — which could be as late as New Year’s. Comments made after midnight tonight might not migrate. Basically, at midnight we go dark, and we’re not sure when we’ll go back up.

When we do, we’ll have The Brides of Rollrock Island (short version? Stunning but pacing not perfect, but did I mention stunning?), The Raven Boys (love! But there are flaws. Although it might still be a top fiver for Karyn), Bomb (Joy is doing that one, and she is obsessing over chapter endings in YA nonfiction right now), Ask the Passengers (Sarah, thumbs up), and Dodger (Sophie loves it!) queued up and ready to go.

So that’s where we’re at.

On the bright side, although we’ve got a few books yet to read plus the five I just mentioned stuck in limbo for a week or two, we HAVE covered, in some form, most of the official contender list we put together in September. And we’re doing our best to pick away at the write-ins, the books that were added to the list because someone nominated them for the Pyrite*, or they short-listed for the Morris, or made more than one year-end list.

Click through for the list of 93 (!) books that ended up being the long list (auto-contenders, general buzz, and write-ins), color coded and linked. And there’s an opportunity to write a guest post on behalf of an as-yet undiscussed book!

And in the meantime, start taking notes for the Pyrite* — we’ll be discussing those titles starting as soon as possible after Jan 1, so use this server-forced downtime to really get your arguments for and against all lined up. Remember to consult the RealPrintz P&P, which we, like the RealCommittee, should use to help organize our arguments, and be prepared for some seriously intense discussion. Because we plan to bring it!

And also in the meantime (and thanks to Miriam for the suggestion), you can go ahead and take our new readership poll — we’ll post results when we are live again!

Sometime in the next few days, and as even more lists come out, I’ll have more to say — this is the kind of data I like to obsess over, after all. But today, only one list really matters: the Pyrite Printz nominations!